What's the Fascination with the Dark Things?

 

Nicole Assante

Professor Horgan

HST 401 – A

1 Jan. 2024

What’s the Fascination with the Dark Things?

Modern day news outlets are infamous for flooding the headlines with morbid and dark stories. Nestled at the bottom of news websites, one can find possibly pleasant articles to read. Looking back at news in 2023, the ones that held headlines pertained to war, politics, economists. Most of which were not pleasant articles to read.

But why is modern news so dark? There cannot be only bad things happening around the world, although it seems that there are. What is it about negative information that keeps humans in a chokehold with the news.

Contrarily, I can say that when scouring news websites, the most interesting news comes from the maybe not so good stories. However, the constant flooding of negative information does have a negative effect on my own mental health. On average, there are about 2 to 3 million news articles published every day.

According to a study by Stuart Soroka, a researcher at the University of Michigan, there is an innate human bias towards negative news coverage (Soroka). Humans simply find negative news more interesting than good news. A headline with a title pertaining to war or conflict most likely would get more coverage than a story about Groundhog Day.

News outlets, with the aim of making money, feed into this bias by publishing more negative news. In a separate study, researchers found that since 2000, the use of negative words in headlines, such as anger, fear, disgust, and sadness, has risen significantly. Contrarily, the use of positive words, such as joy has seen a steady decline (Rozado).

If news outlets have caught on to our innate biases towards negative news, what explains that only 38% of U.S. adults follow the news all or most of the time (Forman-Katz)? In a new study conducted by Pew Research they found that the popularity of the news has significantly decreased. Many of the participants related these feelings to changes in daily habits, a declining trust in the media, and the feeling of “news fatigue”. News fatigue is the idea that there is simply too much news available and is causing fatigue amongst readers. Certainly, if there are 2 million articles published every day, there is no doubt that people may get stressed by the sheer amount of information available. More so that most of the news we see may be taking a toll on the mental wellbeing of readers.

It's incredibly important to think about the news that readers are missing out on. F.D. Flam in her article The 10 Most Intriguing Science Breakthroughs of 2023, states that “not all news is bad” (Flam). Although it may be difficult, readers should try to find positive news. Society should not miss out on crucial news due to news outlets pushing negative news. We are already seeing a decrease in news interaction, so what will this hold for the future of news coverage? We may see an increase in positive news articles in the future. For our own mental sake, it’s important to highlight the good in the world. At the end of the day, not everything is as bad as it seems.

Works Cited

Flam, F.D. “The 10 Most Intriguing Science Breakthroughs of 2023.” Bloomberg.Com, Bloomberg, 30 Dec. 2023, www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-12-30/the-10-most-intriguing-science-breakthroughs-of-2023.

Forman-Katz, Naomi. “Americans Are Following the News Less Closely than They Used To.” Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 24 Oct. 2023, www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/24/americans-are-following-the-news-less-closely-than-they-used-to/.

Rozado, David, et al. “Longitudinal analysis of sentiment and emotion in news media headlines using automated labelling with Transformer language models.” PLOS ONE, vol. 17, no. 10, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0276367.

Soroka, Stuart, et al. “Cross-national evidence of a negativity bias in psychophysiological reactions to news.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 116, no. 38, 2019, pp. 18888–18892, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1908369116.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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